Reception
by isaytoodlepip
Summary: Set after "House Divided" - Amber POV. "Occasionally, while he ignores her the best he can, she tries to figure out what she is."


In the night, she lets him pretend to sleep. She lets him stare at the wall, moves out of his vision. As much as she can. He always was afraid to lose control, and sometimes, in the short gasp between the pain and his futile attempts to find or give comfort in that shaky glide of strong fingers over wasted leg, she'll be tugged into sight, face fluctuating between grimace and smirk. In those moments, she'll focus on the speed with which his eyelids descend. Fast, he's embarrassed and angry and frustrated by her presence. Slow, and it's even more heartbreaking. Slow, and she knows he wanted her there as proof that he's not alone. But then he always remembers that she is him, and they are alone. So he'll close his eyes to the false comfort, as if he doesn't deserve even that.

But tonight, he's given up sleeping pills and Vicodin and hope and she's letting him stare at the wall and he's letting her be there without shoving it in his face, the fact that he's cracking. The air in the bedroom is stagnant, faintly sour. Cold. She doesn't have to look around the room to know what's in it, but she does. Have to. Somehow, she is not just _him_. Somehow, she is Amber. Or maybe just everything he knew about Amber, and she's discovering that what House knows is enough to create worlds.

Occasionally, while he ignores her the best he can, she tries to figure out what she is. He spent days on insomnia and drugs, on MS and tumors and complications from head injuries. She had gone along with every good theory, mocked every bad one, but they had reached the end of physiological causes just that evening and now she's letting him deal with the fact that it must be psychological. Now, she's dealing with it herself. She's always hated this existential crap.

He shifts on the bed beside her, flexes the arm tucked beneath his pillow and rolls his shoulder. She echoes the movement unconsciously, and then wonders how the hell that is possible. Maybe…maybe she is a manifestation of his preconscious mind. She knows she's not just a mass of his repressed desires and memories. Even she has to dig deep to bring those to mind, and when she finds them, they are few and far between. She's not surprised. House is too obsessed with the truth to hide it from himself. Or maybe he's just too masochistic. From the glimpses she's seen of his childhood, she wishes she could take some psychic shovel and bury that shit for good. Some things, you just don't need to know. Even if you're Gregory House.

So, not the unconscious mind (though does the fact that he's ignoring her tonight count as repression? and would that change anything, for either of them?). Preconscious…does that make sense? A reception area, a memory warehouse, where repressed thoughts and experiences pass through, letting her remember them in the same way she could still smell James's aftershave in the kitchen minutes after he'd gone to work. An almost physical response to the trace of something only recently departed. When she's not actively engaged in playing games with House, when she steps back and lets him get on with it, she has to contend with…ice and leather, spiders and mountains and oceans, the slick heat of a woman named Stacy and the lingering smell of Wilson's aftershave and, worst of all, so many _I love you_'s.

And she has so many facts running through her head that she wonders if he has a sporadic eidetic memory. She sometimes finds herself wishing that she could speak so many languages when she was alive, but it's thoughts like those that give her a headache. And then the realization that she could feel pain…she couldn't help the curiosity that second night that drove her to dig in deep to try to feel what he was feeling. The agony radiating from her thigh to her toes had her screaming for mercy, waking him up from his much-needed drug-induced nap. When he saw her there, gripping her leg, she swears his eyes turned glassy and pained, and an image flashed through her head. Not of himself in the days after the infarction, but of her, cold and shaken on a city bus with shrapnel impaling her leg and all the trust in the world that House could save her. In the smaller world of his bedroom, she tried to forgive him that, tried to disappear because she could feel in her chest the weight of his guilt and sorrow and hurt that seeing her again brought, but part of him wouldn't let her leave and they had stared at each other until the pills let him fall back asleep.

And now, they know it's not their choice. Not the pain, nor her presence. In the morning, they'll have to deal with that. It doesn't take a genius to see how terrified he is of subjecting himself to the unknowable. One 45-minute session with the shrink in New York had sent him fleeing so fast that he'd totaled his bike. All because she had asked too many questions that he just couldn't answer, and he hadn't felt so ill-prepared since grade school. He'd thought it would be easier to live in misery than put himself through hell, but then Kutner…

House shifts again, restless in all senses of the word. She stares at his curled back, at the hair at the nape of his neck, darkened and curled by sweat. _He has nice arms_, she finds herself thinking, and then must suppress a laugh. Was that her? she wonders (the remembered her that is somehow separate from the…unremembered _him_). Or was that some unexpected vanity expressing itself as desire in her thoughts? Were they thoughts? Were they _hers_? As he lie there trying to sleep, could he somehow hear everything that was going through her head?

She doubted it. The thing with Chase…even she knows House well enough to be certain that _no_ part of him wanted to see Chase dead, let alone be responsible for it. Like the height of K2, she hadn't been able to remind House that Chase was allergic to strawberries until he had prompted her, and she'd been thinking of James (not Chase) doing body shots when the image of Karamel popped into her head…but who knows how _motive_ works in a scenario like this? Still, she couldn't stop herself from telling House that he has a need to destroy people's happiness, just like she hadn't been able to stop herself from telling him that he deserved Wilson's hate.

No. Not _just like_. That Amber from the bus and her were completely different people. She doesn't even want to _try_ to think of how that might be possible.

But House is depressed. And someone close to him almost died. And she shouldn't be surprised that his twisty little brain immediately cast her and, by deductive reasoning, himself as a would-be murderer.

House can be a real moron sometimes.

He doesn't turn to confront her at that thought, and she's almost positive it's because he doesn't know. Part of her is unreadable, for him. He couldn't interpret the look of grief that must have been on her face when he asked Cuddy for help and admitted that he hasn't slept since Kutner died. He couldn't fathom why she'd feel him worthy of such an emotion. She'd almost wished that she'd disappear by morning, to save him from this descent, no matter the cost to her.

But she's still here and he's going insane and all she wants to do at this moment is comfort him. Touch him. Memories flit through her mind, his mother's soft lips against his temple and Jimmy's warm hand on his in the ICU. If he was himself, he'd push her away for trying. But he's not himself. He's her, too, so why can't he be the part of her that takes what she wants?

She eases closer to him. First contact at the knees, then she's flush against his back, one hand digging under the pillow for his, the other wrapping around his middle and curling up against his chest. They remember the night he tried so hard to catch these very hands, and suddenly they are both crying. For each other. For themselves.

And she doesn't want to ever let him go. His arms are strong, but hers are stronger, and she doesn't want to let him go. She knows that Wilson and Cuddy will step in, and soon. She wonders if any of them will have the balls to force House back into therapy. _Bring it on_, she thinks, as she tightens her grip and buries her face in House's hair, pressing remembered lips against his temple.

They've both been alone for far too long.


End file.
